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April 18, 2014

Mean Streets and (Apparently) Good Kids....

[Image: Flowers, 2007, JA Van Devender]

Location: McArthur Memorial Park, Inchon, SK

2 Samuel 4:10–11 (NKJV)

10 when someone told me, saying, ‘Look, Saul is dead,’ thinking to have brought good news, I arrested him and had him executed in Ziklag—the one who thought I would give him a reward for his news. 11 How much more, when wicked men have killed a righteous person in his own house on his bed? Therefore, shall I not now require his blood at your hand and remove you from the earth?”

The image today, flowers, are for the life of Michael Mayfield (see HERE). This tragic story fills my heart with sorrow... almost as if I had known him and watched him grow up. Clean cut in appearance, a leader in his age-group advocating peer mediation for the settling of grievances rather than violence. Good student, top athelete, strong Jr. ROTC performance and accepted for undergraduate education at a private Christian school in North Carolina. A child of the streets it looked like he was going to win... to not only survive which is victory unto itself, ... but to transcend the culture of his youth.

Not so... he was found dead of a gun shot wound to the head inside a van on those same streets.

The following quote from one of his young friends, from the article, is a commentary on his life and a blanket indictment of the immediate culture in which he lived.

"The one thing I want people to understand is this is not another bad kid getting shot," she said. "This is one of the good ones that was on the right track, that had goals, that loved helping other people get on their feet. "He was a part of the future, that just got taken away. He was important to us."

The commentary on his life: "He was important to us." He was extraordinary in this... The kids on the streets have lots of role models... few of them commendable... and yet, here was one that was popular, cool and confident. He pointed them to something other than the despair that attended their normal experience. He pointed them toward "potential", toward "possibility", toward escape. That says a lot.

The blanket indictment: "..this is not another bad kid getting shot." Notice the grizzled resignation in that statement. It is now the circumstance that "bad kids" getting shot is pretty much a way of life, the new or not so new, normal. Here is the true crisis in our American culture. We can rail away left and right (politically) over the foolishness coming out of our national leaders. We can wring our hands over the neo-Soviet invasion of Crimea and their threatened incursion into the Ukraine. We can, in near panicked frenzy, worry about the teetering finanical situation and the tottering hold that Wall Street has on our prosperity.

We can, and we should, be zealous in facing and solving those problems. But can we truly say that those things are more important than this, that kids are dying on our streets and we are apparently impotent in the face of that fact.

National leaders began shouting for justice when Trayvon Martin was shot. I do not intend to resurrect the details of that case nor Martin's relative "goodness" vis-a-vis Michael Mayfield. All that I am saying is that this case is every bit as damning of our culture as that one, and possibly even more so. The only thing I am asking for is national outrage... followed by national repentance... followed by national change. Is that too much to ask?

My office wall is filled with photographs of "my kids." Some of them are my own kids and grandkids, but most are not. Most of them are the bright faces of children whom I have watched grow and prosper over these past decades. Some of the pictures are of families, the parents include at least one that grew up before my eyes and over whose wedding and baptism of their babies, I was privileged to officiate.

Michael Mayfield's photo is on someone else's wall I am certain, perhaps even his pastor's there in Baltimore. Today, I join that person or persons, however many they may be, in mourning for his life and for the deep regret of not being able to add other photos of him in the ages and stages that were to follow this one.

Today is Good Friday... and tonight we gather around the cross... to steep ourselves in the dreadful price that is required to atone for sin. A dreadful price that has been paid. God has done something about the horror of sin around us... it is time for us to respond in our lives and to the extent that His Holy Spirit equips us to do it.

It is time for us all, to band together and change things.

It is time for us to make it possible for kids to survive... on our street at least... and then together... the others as well. The time of hand wringing is long since passed... God's justice must be administered (as in David's example above) and God's mercy must be shown to those at risk before they are ensnared by the evil one, and God's people must shift their focus from the petty things that command our attention and start bringing Good News and Good Works to our land.